Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

We need an AI pause button. It’s time to stop and think

The rush to invest endless amounts in AI has gotten so mad that no one is stopping to think about its consequences for society.

There is an Indian story revolving around a king who asked his advisors to invent something where his feet would never get dirty when walking around. His advisors got into a frenzy, for a regal wish is like an order with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. One of the solutions was to cover the whole kingdom with leather so that no dirt would stick to His Majesty’s feet. But it was clearly expensive and impractical, for this would mean nothing would grow on the land beneath if it was covered fully with leather, or any other thing, for that matter. The ultimate logical solution was found in the invention of footwear. You wear it and your feet stay clean if you so desire.

Today, when large language models (LLMs) are driving the pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI), or artificial general intelligence (AGI) to rival human intelligence, it appears that the solutions we are seeking are similar to covering the earth with leather in order to keep your feet clean. The query the model needs to answer may be minor (Eg: What is the best food for cats?) but to answer it ChatGPT or Gemini use billions of texts stored in multiple data centres in order to figure out your probable answer based on pattern recognition and predictions on which word or phrase is most likely to follow which one. Based on how you word your query, the answer may vary, and sometime may even sound silly or random or wrong – also known as hallucinations.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which, a few months ago, reported having over 700 million daily users, requires – according to an IEEE report – 850 Mw of power daily – or 310 Gw annually. That’s more than India’s total non-fossil-fuel-based power capacity of 263 Gw. And this is only one LLM we are talking of. There are literally scores of LLMs being created, often using text and data sourced from the internet, often without paying licence fees to those who created the content in the first place.

While power consumption will obviously reduce as better and more energy-efficient solutions are deployed in future, there is still a larger question about the utility of such LLMs, and what kind of social outcomes they will lead to. More so when LLM creators are advertising trivial uses like which hanky to use with which suit or to compare the performances of cricketers. If such trivia and nonsense is going to use up enormous quantities of power that could be used for better things, LLMs do not sound like a great idea to me. And when they are used to replace human labour and intelligence wholesale, they will cause incalculable social........

© ThePrint